It’s because it speaks to the myth of the rugged individualist and the most phallic-period possible conception of “do what thou wilt”.
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I beat Ivalice Chronicles last night. when I first played FFT, I was 14, and I made it to the last boss and could not figure out how to beat it, so I didn’t. being able to close the book on this game, finally, was a real treat. after finishing it, I was left speechless and depressed until I fell asleep. Matsuno and Sakimoto et al were all at their best with this game - it’s rare I finish a game wanting more, which I think speaks to how fun the battle system is.
my end game team was:
Ramza as Monk/Gallant Knight - I got Ultima for completions sake, but it wasn’t very useful with this setup.
Knight/Dancer with dual-wielding - I never used Dancer in my original playthrough, and it’s such a fun class
Mime - the requirements to unlock Mime are nuts and so I felt compelled to do it. figuring out how to use him most effectively was a lot of fun, and with the Dancer (and sometimes Bard, when I was using one) he became integral to my party strategy
Orlandeau with Chemist subclass - broken overpowered character. feels like cheating a bit, but by the end my other characters were just as useful
Cloud with Samurai subclass - in the original game they start Cloud at level 1, so making him useful feels like a gargantuan task. in this one, he starts at level 50 - also not as useful as he could be, but by the end I made him do some really incredible damage with Doublehand and getting his Bravery up to 97
now I guess I should get back to finished DQ1&2 HD-2D. but
maybe I should replay FFT
hmmm
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It’s also a genre created by russian fascists (escape from tarkov directly funds war criminals) so it has had alt-right weirdos baked in from the start
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yeah, don’t underestimate the politics of tarkov that undergird this whole thing
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i’m playing the smt3 remaster. i got cheated out of the true last boss by ubisoft or ghostlight or whoever is responsible for the never patched european psn edition. this time i will go through with it and destroy everything.
i do find it appealing to work towards rejecting any sort of worldly creation, just bust it all up just ruin everything. and for what? got bored and the violence was fun. maybe a slight hint of toxic delight at just ruining everybody’s plans. good fun. anyway i may have been trying to pick up angels for like 20 minutes or so. somehow they keep vibe-checking me accurately, like they know i’m just gonna throw them in the fusion chamber
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I wonder what a nonviolent extraction shooter would look like. 5 teams spawn in a map. Everybody gets more XP with every team that extracts. People are encouraged not to leave anyone behind. maybe some Raw Danger vibes.
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4Xtion Shooter
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I had to bail on The Last Guardian because my frustration with the controls was draining all my enjoyment. But I had some good times with this overall.
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Jim Frog Fractions once again makes a PiCoSteveMo Classic 
pretending this is like a metroidvania version of snakebird (idk i’ve never played snakebird)
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When I close my eyes I see the damn Ace Combat targeting reticle.
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I’m missing some O-parts in 13-2 and making zero progress outside of Fragments and side quests which I can’t tell if that is helping or not.
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I feel like friendslop, or whatever that genre is called, is basically this since the appeal of a pseudo-open world with proximity voicechat where it feels like anything can happen through social dynamics is the same appeal. The only difference is they’ve removed combat and resources.
Curious at which point you quit. I think there are some really great set pieces in the late game but I don’t blame anyone for bailing. I spent 90 minutes trying to get the thing to swim on my first playthrough.
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Related:
Battle Royale the book is all about how the battle Royale sucks and most people involved would be trying to escape.
Battle Royale the game genre is about how wouldn’t it be like soooooo epic to win the battle royale.
It’s not nonviolent (PvE, after all) but stuff like Hole, Zero Sievert, and Forever Winter demonstrate that the mechanic can be well adapted to PvE and co-op only games.
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I played Girl’s Garden last night. It has a lot going on for something akin to a Colecovision game.
You are a girl collecting flowers to give to a boy you like. The timer is a meter where 100% is you and 0% is a different girl. The boy steadily walks towards a different girl. There are flowers everywhere but only perfect ones will do. Wilting or budding flowers just give you points and dead flowers ruin your whole bouquet. At the same time, bears are trying to get you. You can also fall into the pond. Each time you mess up, your heart floats to the top of the screen and gets shot by an arrow.
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It was the umpteenth “go fetch a barrel of magic food for the beast because it’s pouting” that finally wore me out. Also tired of having to pet it and calm it down after every single fight.
I had made it a little past the point where you fall from a crumbling tower and through the roof of a room you’d previously solved . I made it past that piece of barrel-based tedium and then ran into another one like 20 minutes later and deleted the game in a fit of exasperation.
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I’ll hand it to Assassin’s Creed Shadows - compared to the last time they did dual protagonists (Syndicate, with Evie and colossal doofus Jacob), Naoe and Yasuke play very differently and are good for different situations.
I think! Because I keep putting off the story and am still just running around as Naoe. She excels in stealth stuff but I keep throwing her into combat encounters I barely come out of.
Right now I’m dabbling in a side quest where you have to kill a pack of ronin who are making a mess of things across the countryside. So far I’ve managed pretty well, but the last one I found is at a tea house…with like six other ronin, all of them way too hearty for Naoe to take on all at once. The area they’re in is so small that at best you could assassinate one and then get swamped.
So now I gotta do the story…I gotta kill this dude, but I need the big man to do it…
Anyway, I’m still impressed by the environment design. I fast traveled enough to advance the seasons to winter, and the way snow storms hit at night and the snow makes it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead is something else.
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Evil Tonight, final report: So it took me 85% of the game, but I eventually realized that I’d been playing it all wrong, and that there’s actually two different ways to shift from The Stance That Allows You To Fight and The Stance That Allows You To Do Everything Else, and that the one I’d been using all along, while it has its uses, is usually the less intuitive and seamless of the two. Having figured that out, traversing the game became significantly more fun–which is good, since one of the game’s extra modes changes it from being Resident Evil 1 to Resident Evil 4, with far more enemies per screen, who drop ammo when defeated.
Now that I’ve finished the main game, I have to say I have a greater appreciation for Resident Evil’s usual approach. While Tonight’s setting–a creepy drama school–is inspired, and the central premise is good–and heck, I can appreciate deciding to make the main character a throwback to works like Dirty Pair–the actual writing is really not great. Kids just don’t belong in survival horror!
Another of the games obtained for Black Friday was a port for the SNES version of Puzzle Bobble, whose one song and voice samples feel just different enough from the Arcade version to drive me nuts. Also the presence of special bubbles on some stages–another deviation from the arcade version–go a long way to actually tie the game to Bubble Bobble.
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yeah see every once in a while i feel a little bit guilty for not engaging more with The Culture of Videogames as a game professor but down that path leads madness because the assumptions being made about me being a “bad” professor by not engaging with this stuff basically end with me shepherding students into this disaster of a game industry as it exists right now and like, fuck that!! in every regard possible!!! so what if my students don’t get jobs in this hellhole of an industry!! i would rather them take their skills elsewhere!!
i say it as a joke, that my rhetorical tactic as a professor is to basically do the annoying professor thing of “but what if music IS games” and then i get to talk about music all the time, but the secret is that i actually do believe it? in fact i believe that music is games more than games are games because look at what games are right now, like come on
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i’ve played shin megami tensei v, a game i’m rnjoying immensely, 25 hours over the past few weeks.
in contrast to what’s been talked about here, i feel guilty forfocussing so much on one game instead of spreading out my tendrils more widely
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yeah i really went through this when i started teaching - like feeling guilty i wasn’t really the person to prepare someone to work in AAA at all, and feeling very not great about having to be cast in that role. at this point there’s increasingly less of an AAA to actually “prepare” people for though and the biggest games are generally something that ideologically it’s too hard to even come up with any justification for really supporting for the reasons described. and outside of that it just feels up in the air where things are going anyway.
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